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Like many nonconformist and beat generation writers, William S. Burroughs takes the outcasts of society as his theme.
William S. Burroughs
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William S. Burroughs
Age: 83 †
Born: 1914
Born: February 5
Died: 1997
Died: August 11
Essayist
Novelist
Painter
Photographer
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
St. Louis
Missouri
William Seward Burroughs II
Uilʹi︠a︡m Berrouz
William Lee
William Burroughs
Ouiliam Baroouz
William Seward Burroughs
Willy Lee
William S. (William Seward) Burroughs
Society
William
Many
Theme
Like
Beat
Beats
Generation
Outcasts
Writers
Nonconformist
Generations
Burroughs
Takes
Outcast
More quotes by William S. Burroughs
Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.
William S. Burroughs
All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else?
William S. Burroughs
You see, should I stand in front of a landscape and paint it, I'm completely ignoring the factor of time. While I am painting it, it's changing, clouds are changing, all sorts of things. So there's the myth there of someone creating in a timeless vacuum.
William S. Burroughs
I wasn't exposed to art as I was growing up, and can't recall the first time I saw a work of art. However, I remember very clearly a vision I had of a little green reindeer when I was a child, and visions emanate from the same mythical area where painting resides. Whatever the reason, I immediately felt comfortable working with visual materials.
William S. Burroughs
No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought.
William S. Burroughs
Madness is confusion of levels of fact. . . . Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels.
William S. Burroughs
We should exterminate all rational thought.
William S. Burroughs
The whole drug war is nothing but a pretext to increase police power and personnel, and that, of course, is dead wrong. So many created imagined drug offenses.
William S. Burroughs
When you cut into the present the future leaks out.
William S. Burroughs
After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.'
William S. Burroughs
If all individuals were conditioned to machine efficiency in the performance of their duties there would have to be at least one person outside the machine to give the necessary orders if the machine absorbed or eliminated all those outside the machine, the machine will slow down and stop forever.
William S. Burroughs
I have no message to give the politicians of the world. They're all completely addicted to promiscuous verbalization and I'm quite sure they would not be at all interested in hearing about cut-ups and hieroglyphics and still less interested to hear about silence.
William S. Burroughs
I think if a writer is not endeavoring to expand and alter consciousness in himself and in his readers, he is not doing much of anything. It is precisely words, word lines, lines of words and images, and associations connected with these word and image lines in the brain, that keep you in present time, right where you are sitting now.
William S. Burroughs
Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.
William S. Burroughs
A doctor is not criticized for describing the manifestations and symptoms of an illness, even though the symptoms may be disgusting. I feel that a writer has the right to the same freedom In fact, I think that the time has come for the line between literature and science, a purely arbitrary line, to be erased.
William S. Burroughs
Language is a virus from outer space.
William S. Burroughs
Is Control controlled by its need to control? Answer: yes.
William S. Burroughs
I don't care if people hate my guts I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.
William S. Burroughs
You see, control can never be a means to any practical end...It can never be a means to anything but more control...like junk.
William S. Burroughs
as soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape.
William S. Burroughs
